You can find politicians in any state who help themselves to all the goodies they can. Nothing special about that.

What makes New Jersey different is that ours aren’t ashamed of it. They believe they deserve all this stuff.

We have characters such as Sen. Nick Sacco (D-Hudson), who has three government jobs and talks about how lucky the public is to have him for a mere $279,000 a year.

We have Essex County Executive Joe DiVincenzo, who jets to Puerto Rico for Super Bowl weekend every year, using donations from the boys who get no-bid country contracts. What’s wrong with that, he asks.

It was in this proud tradition of Jersey chutzpah that members of the Newark City Council gathered Thursday to dispel the vile notion that they are gorging themselves on the public dime.

“This council has made an attempt to cut this budget to the bone,” Council President Donald Payne Jr. huffed. “We’re going to continue doing the types of things we’ve been doing. We’re not going to get excited.”

Okay, fine. Let’s take a look at what they’ve been doing in the past few years.

They fired massive numbers of cops, despite the fact that children are regularly gunned down on the streets here. They fired garbage workers who were so desperate for work they showed up even when they weren’t getting paid. In all, they let go more than 1,000 employees in a city where unemployment is raging at Depression-era levels. The survivors, aside from cops and firefighters, had to take furloughs for two consecutive years.

It goes on. They closed libraries. They shut down pools during hot summer weekends. They scaled back programs that provided rides to the hospital for the sick and elderly. They took away nursing visits from others. And they raised taxes sharply, every year.

But what they didn’t do is impose anything like that hardship on themselves. They kept their salaries, the fattest city council paychecks in the state. They kept their full staffs, many of them relatives. They kept their city cars and the free gas.

They even set aside $25,000 for flowers. Nothing like a card and a bouquet for folks to remember the local pol by.

Payne, as council president, earns $94,000 a year for his part-time job. The rest have to make do with just $85,000.

But they can have other jobs, as several of them do, including Payne. The grand prize winner on that front is Councilman Ras Baraka, who works as principal of a local high school, and has a combined salary of $210,000.

“The council spends $4 million and that’s less than 2 percent of the budget,” Baraka says. “Most of that is for staff. And am I prepared to fire people because people at The Star-Ledger feel we have too many people working for us? Absolutely not.”

Baraka says he didn’t support any of the layoffs. The problem, he says, it not spending. The problem is that the city’s businesses, and even nonprofits, don’t pay enough taxes.

“We have a master-slave relationship with these people and it’s been that way forever,” he says.

Mayor Cory Booker is asking the council to cut its budget in half, to about $2 million a year. No chance he’ll get that.

But even if he did, Newark’s council would still be the most expensive in the state by far, more than triple the cost of the council in Jersey City.

To justify the spending, some council members criticize Booker and say they have to provide services people can’t get at City Hall.

“A lot of the problem is the mayor has lost confidence of people,” says Councilman Darrin Sharif. “I’m not talking about the nut bags who come and scream at council meetings, but people who supported him and had great hopes.”

In fairness, Booker is seen as aloof by many people in the city. But the mayor sees some irony in this complaint.

“We eliminated our office of constituent services when we did the layoffs,” he says.

Councilman Ron Rice is known as a workhorse, and there’s no doubt the city has unmet needs. Sharif has that rep as well, and neither man has a second job.

Each council member is allowed a staff of five, but Sharif says he left one spot vacant in anticipation of belt-tightening he supports.

“It will be a blow to me, and limit what I’m trying to accomplish,” he says. “But if we’re going to put everything on the table, it wouldn’t make sense for me to hire another person.”

So maybe there is hope. Councilman Augusto Amador has been pressing for cuts for years, with some help from Councilman Anibal Ramos.

Even Payne grudgingly said he will consider cuts. And at the news conference when he defended this spending with five other members standing by him in support, he took only one question and then left.

The council president, it seems, may have felt some old-fashioned shame. Imagine that.